So I've been using most of my spare brain cycles reading and thinking about NaNo. This is the level where I'm at: I have just realized that I have exactly *one* honest-to-god male character in this story. "Honest-to-God" being taken literally: I do have a couple gender-variant characters who would probably in modern culture identify as male, but in their milieu, when they get down on their knees in honesty, they identify either as female or thirdsex.

All the other developed male characters are either dead before the story starts or are killed soon after my character meets them. The only cisgender man who gets much of a speaking part spends most of his appearance in the story running errands for his girlfriend. ...That's kind of cool, considering that I didn't do it on purpose at all. And that I'm supposedly writing a patriarchal culture.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post more world-buildy stuff in the last month, but, um, not so much, and writing starts tomorrow! One thing I did get written up, rather than just marked in a library book, is my world's cosmology: Anyone writing in a fantasy world is writing in a world where the basic underlying principles are at least a bit different from ours, and I think it's important that the writer know what those principles are. My *characters* won't necessarily know, or they might have a lot of it wrong, and it may never come out in the story that they have it wrong, but I have to know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's absolutely necessary for the world to hang together.

It was especially tricky for this universe because I want it to be a world where the gods are present and magic works - but I also want to be able to use this world for alternate-history fantasy stories set anywhere from earliest prehistory all the way to near-future speculation. So I had to come up with a cosmology where Gods were present and magic works for *every* religion and belief system ever, from animism to m-theory, with minimal fudging necessary.

Um. Tricky. But I had a lot of other people's efforts to draw on, so here's what I've got, and I think it'll work for at least this story's world, with enough options left open to make it work for others, too: ( It starts with a bubble in the deeps. )

Tomorrow: Draw maps, work out language phoneme charts for naming, make last plot outline. Oh, and make a Halloween costume.